Page 81 of Road Trip to Forever
“Will you at least tell me when the surprises are?”
“Tonight,” he says. “And all day tomorrow.”
“Tonight?” Exhaustion melts to giddiness, adrenaline crashing over me. “It’s almost seven.”
“That’s why we’re on a tight schedule.”
“No wonder you wanted to get out of the convention center so quickly.”
“I have my reasons. Can you remind me of the plans for the rest of our time down here? I want to make sure I know exactly what’s going on and when.”
“You don’t have detailed notes on your phone?”
“Of course I do. I just want to hear it from you.”
“Tomorrow is the second surprise. The next day is the hotel check-in with a mixer in the evening. The day after is a networking event. Then the show will start.”
“So many things to look forward to.”
“I’d like to check out that bookshop if we can before we head out to the hotel. They entered a holiday decorating competition a few years back, and their store turned out so cute.”
“How did you find out about them? They’re thousands of miles away from home.”
“They posted something about reading banned books a while back that went viral. Do you know what that means?”
“I know what going viral means.” Patrick rolls his eyes. “I’m six months older than you, not sixty.”
“Says the man who bought a newspaper at the last rest stop just to cut out the crossword puzzle. I’ve never asked…. is there a reason you love to do puzzles so much?”
“Yeah.” He smiles, transported back to a different time in his life. “Grams. She did one every single day. In her lounger in the living room, feet kicked up with a paper folded in quarters. She wanted to keep her brain sharp, and she got me hooked on doing them.”
I hear the longing in his voice, how much he misses her and the memories they had. It’s how I talk about my dad. A mix of sadness and joy, competing emotions at opposite ends of the spectrum.
I love to tell stories about him. The fun times we had together, like when he bought a monster water slide and laid it out in our street so all the neighborhood kids could play. When he wrote to me every single day I was away at summer camp, even if it was one sentence that saidmiss you. At the Cape, where we built sandcastles until the sun set.
Then the stories stop, I remember there won’t be any new ones, and sadness washes over me like the pull of the tide.
“I loved her,” I say. I rest my elbow on the console between us and reach over, my palm settling on his forearm. “I love that she taught us how to play bridge. We were the only twelve-year-olds who even knew what that card game was.”
“Yeah.” He chuckles, but there’s pain laced around the edges. “She was a wonderful lady.”
“The best lady. Who I aspire to be, honestly. Ice cream every night after dinner? A collection of friends at ninety-one? What more could you want?”
“She loved you. She would always tell me—” Patrick stops short of finishing his sentence, chuckles again, and shakes his head. “Never mind. It’s not important.”
“Excuse me.” I flick his ear. “Everything that woman had to say was important, buddy. Don’t hold out on me.”
“She would always tell me you were a special girl.” His voice grows soft and tender. “And I would always tell her she was right.”
I stare at his profile. The curve of his jaw. The twist of his mouth like he’s about to add something else, but is choosing to stay quiet instead. The years of life showing themselves around his eyes. So many of those years spent together, fond memories and pictures in a scrapbook.
“Grams asked me something once,” I find myself saying, propelled forward by an invisible force. My hand moves down his arm to the matching friendship bracelet. I play with the frayed edges, the string we’ve had to cut and add to and stitch together to hold up over the years. I find solace in the twine, and it makes me want to share this story with him.
“Something philosophical, I take it?” Patrick asks.
“Yeah. It was right after I dropped out of college. That semester of being away from home was jarring. My course load was heavy. I missed my parents. I missedyou. I missed the easy life we had as kids and I just… I gave up, I guess. Grams and I were drinking tea in your parents’ living room, and I was in a bad place. Confused about the future. About what I wanted to do and how to make fashion my full-time job. She looked at me over the rim of that teacup she loved to use—”
“The one with the flowers on it,” Patrick says. I nod and smile, the afternoon as clear as day in my mind.
